how to be dead
by the general girl
Summary: Uchiha Sasuke dies. Haruno Sakura goes on. — sasusaku
1. a

two unrelated pieces on death, done for two separate asks on tumblr.

* * *

 _ **one:** there are certain kinds of connections that are so deep that when broken you feel the snap of it inside you._

—

—

When Sarada's father-not yet forty-died, her mother did not weep and moan and throw herself on the casket; Sarada did not have to make the funeral arrangements as her mother laid catatonic in the bed that she'd shared with her husband, and her friends did not have to stop by to make sure there was fresh food in the fridge or that the house was clean.

No, when Sarada's father died, Uchiha Sakura sorted out the funeral herself. She consoled her heartbroken daughter and had quiet lunches at Ichiraku with the Hokage. She wore black for the appropriate amount of time; she mourned quietly and placed incense and offerings at the Uchiha family shrine. For all intents and purposes, Uchiha Sakura forged forward. She recovered. She moved on.

But Sarada knew:

When they argued about whether the new mission was too dangerous for the chunin to attempt, and her mother would roll her eyes and glance to the empty space to her right and then the sudden silence—

The tomato onigiri her mother always had for breakfast even though Sarada knew Sakura had never been fond of the fruit—

The space at the kitchen table, always empty; her father's tea set and his favorite mugs and shoes, none of which Sarada or her mother ever used, still out, still well-kept, still dust-free—

More than a year and a half after the fact, when Sarada no longer felt like her heart was being ripped raw every time she thought about her father, she found her mother sitting on their veranda at three am. Sarada had been getting water after she'd jerked awake unexpectedly from a nightmare, but now the empty glass hung loosely from her fingers, forgotten.

Her mother wasn't crying; she wasn't making a single sound. But oh, the nearly obscene curve of her back as she folded inwards on herself; the shaking shoulders, the skin stretched tight over the knuckles of clutching hands—

Her mother wasn't crying, but her grief still stole all the air from Sarada's lungs.

And Sarada had thought she'd known, had thought she'd understood, but now she realized—

There would be no moving forward or onwards or over for her mother; there would only be time, taking Haruno Sakura further away from Uchiha Sasuke.


	2. b-side

to cleanse the palate.

* * *

 **two:** "i wish you hadn't come back."

—

—

"I wish you hadn't come back."

Sakura waits: a minute, then two, then five, but the only answer she receives is the wind rustling through the branches above her.

She never visits the cenotaph, or even the Uchiha family plot. This is the last place she'd seen him, eyes soft and unguarded, his heart a steady drumbeat underneath her palm. This is where he'd said goodbye.

In their secret place in the woods behind the small house Sasuke had built, away from the village and his abandoned family district, Sakura keeps a shrine for the man she'd loved more than almost anything in the world.

(—spider lilies in the spring to signify goodbye, white chrysanthemums that bloom in the fall with her grief, red camellias to flame in the winter for their heart and his fire.

He'd planted the camellias for her, and then Kabuto had surfaced with rogue nin in the south. When Naruto returned from the mission alone, his back bent with grief and guilt, Sakura hadn't been able to find it in herself to cry—to make even a single sound.

They'd barely had a year together.)

Sakura gazes past the bellflowers in front of her, her hands half-buried in loamy soil. He'd wanted to leave, and she'd asked him—he'd stayed because of her. He'd stayed _for_ her.

If he'd never come back, if he'd left as he'd initially planned—

The tiny blue blossoms blur into soft spots of color, and half a year since receiving the news, Sakura finally cries.

* * *

Something soft brushes her cheek. Squinting against the glare of the late afternoon sun, Sakura rubs the sleep from her eyes, and gasps: plumeria blooms drift lazily from above, covering her legs and lap in a fragrant carpet of white.

There are no plumeria trees in her small, wild garden; there are no plumeria trees in the whole of Konoha. They need year-round, near tropical weather, the kind that only the southernmost regions of the continent can provide.

Sakura stares unblinkingly at the small flowers, feeling as if she has her heart in her throat, in her hands; as if the blooms are pieces of her heart that she'd systematically plucked.

( _He's here, he's not. He's dead, he's alive.)_

Swallowing, she gathers her courage and her fear and her wishes and looks up…

* * *

(Plumeria for a new beginning.)


End file.
